Interpretive Memo
Throughout this research period, there have been many problems that have plagued the process, sometimes grinding it to a halt. As I quickly found, technology can be an impossible enemy to overcome, at least when considering the entirety of my project was done on line, and just as difficult is finding the archives of a defunct countries puppet newspaper. Irregardless of such difficulties, I am final able to close the door on this project; it is with great excitement I must admit. The Nuclear Age of the Space Race, my final project has been completed. This video project, which is only the second of its kind, has been a very interesting ordeal to work through. I hesitate to say that I hated the entirety of the creation of this video, but it is without a doubt, an overall experience which was not enjoyable. This is in part due to the fact that I had been hoping to find many of the answers which I was unable, not just for the sake of my grade, but rather out of my own interest in the research. My research portfolio is all but complete now, and all that is left of the process is to move over entries from the original blog, which was unable to provide an easily accessible table of contents in stark constrast with the wikia system, as well as from other places such as the Word documents and finally from some small places here and there such as my English spiral. When looking at the reason for this particaular project, there were a few motivations and some of which lead directly to the problems that I faced. I chose events in the Cold War, because information sharing was at most scarce, and there were no devices such as the internet allows that offer the ability for uncensored information to be spread. This was important because my ultimate goal was to look and compare what Americans where told and how that could contrast with the way that their Soviet counterparts were. Common sense says that American newspapers would of course show something far closer to the truth than a communist state paper would, but how differently was my question. I was unable to adequetly answer this myself, as I found little to no access to the Pravda, 'THE' paper of the communist party. I was able to find sites which would offer a sentence or two that might take a crack at what the paper had said, and it was, as one might expect, calling the paper out for itsvery controlled propaganda spewing ways. While this was something I had expected to encounter, it was an actual look at the paper which I was hoping for, so that I might directly compare the events. While there was an abundance of American papers which required subscriptions in order to gain access to the archives, if you knew what to search for, one could find free sources that were offered by the very same papers asking for payment on thier home page. But this was not the case with the Pravda, which I only found one direct source for, though it was not free. I would have concidered payment, should it have been relaitively cheap, but my email went unanswered. (This may have been more to do witht the infamous PC, Prairie Crossing, internet, not the site) Another interesting thing that kept coming up when analysing previous pieces was this already Space Race esque theme already appearing in my papers and the background for my original blog. I can honestly say that while I find Space to be interesting, I don't consider my self a space nut, and yet that is where this project seems to have gone. It is with these final thoughts that I leave this class, and I am ready for whatever comes next...referencing Christmas break of course. Back to Table of Contents